The present embodiments relate to planning for resection. Preoperative surgery planning is a preliminary step for a tumor resection procedure.
To plan for resection, computed tomography (CT) scanning of the patient is performed. The resulting data representing a volume is presented to the physician in a series of parallel slices. A physician may view the slices in the series to define the resection surface in three dimensions. However, it is very tedious to mark the resection surface in the patient's CT scan slice by slice.
Computer-aided liver resection tools may provide a three-dimensional (3D) resection surface from a limited input by the physician. For example, the user inputs a number of points. The contour is interpolated into the volume using radial basis functions (RBF) or principal component analysis (PCA) to obtain the resection surface. However, interpolation techniques are neither accurate nor intuitive. The accuracy of the interpolated surface depends on the number of points provided by the user. Minor changes in the input points may highly influence the coefficients of the PCA or RBF, so that minor changes in the input do not necessarily mean minor changes in the resection surface. Conflicting inputs (i.e., inputs suggesting different labeling of the resection and the remnant for the same voxel) highly degrade the quality of the resection surface. Conflicting inputs may easily occur as the user draws the resectors in 2D planes since the user may not have a sense of how these multiple resectors may interact in 3D.